1. Field
The present disclosure relates to printing systems, and more specifically, to a system and a method for estimating the amount of marking material required for a print job.
2. Description of Related Art
When pricing a print job, print shops must be able to estimate the needed consumables and expenses, e.g., paper sheets, binding tape, periodic printer maintenance and shipping. In any print process, a key cost component is the marker or marking material used to generate the prints. In the case of xerographic printing, this marking material, toner, can be a significant factor in determining the overall expense of producing the print job.
Inaccurate marking material usage estimation may negatively impact print shops in a variety of ways. If the shop underestimates the amount of marking material needed to print a job, job production costs will exceed the estimate and the shop may lose money. Alternatively, if the shop overestimates the amount of marking material needed to print a job, its pricing may be high, causing the print shop to lose the job to a competitor.
The amount of marking material used for a page of the print job is generally related to the intensity value assigned to each pixel of that page. A straightforward approach is to acquire these intensity values is to produce an uncompressed bitmap of the page and sum the intensity values at the pixel locations. This approach of gathering image data (from the uncompressed bitmap) to be used to estimate marking material usage is relatively slow. That is, the steps of writing and reading a full bitmap used in this approach are often computationally inefficient and expensive, and decrease the performance of the printing system. Therefore, a high performance approach for estimating marking material usage is needed.